In Reply to: Re: Now I'm wondering posted by Juniper on July 07, 2003 at 06:18:38:
Finally someone who's interested in all this! I've studied this with great fascination, and agree that yes there was a power struggle there. The dates I have come up with were slightly different than yours.
Q - "Quelle" or the Sayings written down almost from the beginning in a hodge-podge of Greek and Aramaic, but mostly Aramaic, given the "sing-song" quality of many of Jesus' sayings when translated back into Aramaic.
Matthew - written down about 53 AD as the apostles were going out to the 6 million Jews of the diaspora in the Roman Empire. Aimed directly at the Greek-speaking Jews, hence it was full of fullfilled OT prophecies.
Mark - written about 57 AD by John Mark (Barnabas' newphew) under the tutelage of Peter. BAsically the outline of Matthew condensed and stripped of allthe Hebrew-isms, and with additional action, description etc added by one like Peter who was a direct eyewitness.
Luke - Says in his preface that "many" have tried to write a gospel, but he wanted to do a thoroughly researched one. HE was a Greek from Macedonia, and it is theorized that his gospel was researched whenhe went back to Judea with Paul,and written under Paul's influnece. Since the Acts is part 2 in a companion volume and was written about 61 AD, that would put the gospel of Luke about 60 AD.
Paul's letters had mostly all been written by that time (60-61 AD) and the difference in the early acceptance of various epistles between Rome and Alexandria, Egypt, seems to indicate strongly that Paul's letters as a unified corpus had been gathered into one book by about 60 AD -- possibly because it looked like Paul might die in prison, so Luke or someone wanted to preserve his works.
There are indications that Hebrews, 1&2 Peter and James were all written by 63 AD at latest. Thus the only remaining letters to be written were the Gospel of John about 90 AD, his 3 little epistles and Revelation by 95 AD when he returned from exile on Patmos.
Now about Q: I do think that Matthew tapped into it heavily and that Luke also did whenhe returned to Judea/Jerusalem to researchhis Gospel. John also quotes long, long sections of talks and prayers verbatim so unless he had a total recall memory (unlikely) he too had a copy of Q up in Ephesus.
I have some thoughts about why Q was not preserved, and think that many of the pithy sayings in Paul's epistles may be Q-isms. You've heard of Papias, a disciple of John, haven't you? He wrote Five huge books gathering up the Sayings of Jesus, but his books were lost over the centuries.